It was not nearly as dramatic as their meeting last year, but FSU’s rout of LSU still scored a double-digit bump and seven-year high on ABC.
Sunday’s LSU-FSU college football game averaged a 4.7 rating and 9.17 million viewers on ABC, up 19% in ratings and 21% in viewership from the same matchup last year (7.6M) and the largest college football audience on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend since Notre Dame-Texas in 2016 (10.9M). Ratings were not immediately available.
Overall, Florida State’s blowout win — which peaked with 10.3 million viewers in the fast-nationals — delivered the third-largest Labor Day weekend audience since that 2016 game. Notre Dame-Ohio State averaged 10.53 million last year and Alabama-Florida State 12.34 million in 2017, both in ABC’s traditional Saturday night window.
Keep in mind that in several markets, ABC — like the rest of the Disney channels — was not available to subscribers of Charter’s Spectrum cable service.
In other week one action, NBC averaged 3.7 million for West Virginia-Penn State in the debut of its weekly primetime Big Ten game (including additional streaming data not tracked by Nielsen). NBC said Monday that it was the network’s second-most watched Labor Day weekend game since 2015 (trailing Notre Dame-Michigan in 2018 at 7.2 million), but it was just the third such game over that span. Viewership peaked at 4.4 million.
NBC also said Saturday’s ECU-Michigan game on Peacock was its most-streamed college football game ever. The network did not disclose any viewership figures.
The full list of week one college football ratings is available here. For a breakdown of the numbers, see this article.
(Nielsen estimates from network PR)
